Over the course of the last week I have been playing perhaps one of the finest games to be released in years. A game made by one of my very favourite studios and perhaps the best studio in the video game industry. I am of course talking about Naughty Dog and their latest masterpiece: The Last of Us. Now I’m not going to bore you with a substandard review of the game nor am I going to offer my own interpretation to the games ending, today I want you to think about how Sony treats their best studio and then contrast that to what Nintendo is doing with one of theirs.

During the Playstation 2’s lifetime, Naughty Dog put out the well received Jak and Daxter series. With the advent of the Playstation 3 they moved onto the massively successful Uncharted Series and then signed off on this generation with The Last of Us. One can only speculate what comes next for the men and women at Naughty Dog, but expectations are understandably high. Looking at the company’s history it all seems perfectly logical, they started with fantastical characters set in a fictional universe and progressed to something more “realistic” that can aptly be described as a playable action movie. To have finished their work on the Playstation 3 with a game that has the emotional weight of an Oscar nominated picture shows tremendous artistic growth from the studio.

Naughty Dogs Latest masterpiece

To contrast the progress of Naughty Dog with Retro Studios, the Texas based Nintendo owned studio, makes for distressing reading. In 2002, Retro released the critically acclaimed Metroid Prime, a game so well received it spawned a trilogy that remains one of the highlights of the Nintendo library. These games were the first foray into the first person perspective for the Metroid franchise, and boy did Retro get things right. Rather than turning Metroid into a shooter they managed to maintain the series emphasis on exploration and eschew linearity. The ability to take a franchise that had been left dormant for just shy of a decade and make it relevant shows great promise for any studio.

So what would Nintendo do with their new first party developer? Put them to work on a new IP? Let them try something new and exciting with another of Nintendo’s classic franchises? Sadly, Nintendo fans were not so lucky. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of almost every classic Nintendo franchise, wanted to see Donkey Kong brought to the Wii. Retro Studios were recommended and what followed was an enjoyable 2D side scrolling platform game … or to put it another way: a game that could quite easily have been made for the Super Nintendo. Since this game was released in 2010, Retro have assisted in the well received Mario Kart 7 for 3DS and assisted in porting their Donkey Kong Wii game to the 3DS.

Is an HD Side scroller really the height of their ambition?

As I wrote in an earlier blog, I assumed going into this years E3 that Nintendo would finally lift the lid on what Retro has been working on for the last few years. Once again I let my imagination run wild. Would it be a new IP for the Wii U? Perhaps they were working on a classic franchise for the 3DS? Instead we got another game in the Donkey Kong Country series … we got another 2D side scroller. During my play through for The Last of Us I couldn’t help but wonder why Sony lets their best studio make games that pushes them in terms of graphical fidelity, intuitive gameplay mechanics, immersive stories and memorable characters yet Nintendo now seems willing only to let their studio make games that can be described as “safe”; games that appeal to an audience that might not be there anymore. Be in no doubt, the Wii U Donkey Kong game will both look and play great but it just isn’t challenging this great studio to push themselves in the same way that Naughty Dog do. I hope that Nintendo prove me wrong and I hope that they do it fast because they are in serious danger of losing this gamer to Sony for the foreseeable future.